Healthwatch, with Dr. Leana Wen: Fentanyl crisis, new COVID variant

It's another edition of the Midday Healthwatch, our monthly conversations about public health with Dr. Leana Wen. Today, Tom will be talking with Dr. Wen about the latest health news from Maryland. The state's COVID-19 Dashboard was moved to the Maryland Department of Health's main website. The state COVID Alert system is set to end Tuesday, May 9, while the federal state of emergency comes to an end on May 11. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization is keeping its eye on a new variant of COVID. Who should get a second bivalent booster, and will it be effective against this latest iteration? We’ll also talk to Dr. Wen about the deepening fentanyl crisis, and what we need to know about recreational marijuana. Plus, Baltimore is looking for a new health commissioner. The current head of the health department, Dr. Letitia Dzirasa, is leaving her post to become the interim Deputy Mayor for Equity Health and human services. Dr. Wen was the city’s health commissioner from 2014 to 2018. We’ll talk about the skills an effective leader in that job needs. Dr. Leana Wen joins host Tom Hall on Zoom. Dr. Wen is one of America’s most trusted and knowledgeable public health experts, and she has been a regular guest on our show since her time as the Baltimore City Health Commissioner, from 2015-2018. Today, the emergency physician is a research professor of health policy and management at the George Washington University's Milken Institute School of Public Health. She’s a columnist for the Washington Post, a medical analyst for CNN, and a non-resident senior fellow at The Brookings Institution. And she's the author of Lifelines: A Doctor's Journey in the Fight for Public Health.Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.